Federation

Peter Schroer — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:23:15 GMT

Current revision posted to PLM Terminology by Peter Schroer on 3/27/2009 1:23:15 PM

Federation is the process of connecting business objects in other systems, such that those business objects can be included in workflows, configurations and business rules.

Virtually all businesses are using multiple information systems to address different aspects of their business. While the IT systems may artificially segregate data into different databases (e.g. customer information in CRM, costing information in ERP and product configuration information in PLM), for the business end-user there are real connections between these data elements, and they need to be treated as a integral set of data. This problem of disconnected data, which really must be related, results in double-data entry and user-developed Excel and ACCESS based applications that extract data from the disparate databases, and create artificial integrated solutions. This approach inherently leads to data syncronization issues, and in the long run, much higher data integrity and security problems.

<o:p> </o:p>

Solving this problem is the basis for the Federation approach. Enterprise business applications that can participate in Federation must be able to:

work with virtual business objects represented by API or Web Services links into 3rd party databases or business systems. These federated objects must be displayed, workflwoed, have additional addtributes added, used in configuration etc... in other words, to the end user, there is no 2nd system, and all the data is linked and organized to fit the business process.
expose its business objects through web services or an API layer, such that get, update, etc transactions are supported.

Aras Corp uses a SOA Web Services architecture to enable bi-drectional Federation. See this Technical Bulletin for instructions on how to deploy federation on Aras Innovator.

Authentication between federated system sources is always a challenge, but through a central authentication service such as Microsoft's Active Directory, these problems have been easily overcome with Aras Innovator..